gested the efficiency of that proceeding to bar heirs; and this started the conceit that thus the lost hair of another man would be recovered. A 'quest of thoughts all tenants to the heart is impaneled to decide the question of title to the visage of the beloved one between the heart and the eye, where the defendant denies the plea, and the verdict is a moiety to each. The remembrance of things past is summoned up to the sessions of sweet, silent thought.

These illustrations have been given as they occur to the memory from hundreds of passages to enforce the argument of the probative force of accumulated circumstances from diverse sources, when there can be no doubt of the circumstances themselves. There is no question here of fabricated evidence. While the simulation of evidence by perverting or inventing circumstances is a device of all fabricators from the time of the exhibition of Joseph's coat to Jacob, the noting the mole on Imogen's snow-pure breast, the smearing by Lady Macbeth of the grooms' faces with blood, and the use of the handkerchief by Iago, are done with legal craft, and form Shakespeare's judgment upon

what is called circumstantial evidence, which after all the judicial cant upon the subject, such as the assertion that circumstances cannot lie, can be made the most illusory of all testimony; for while circumstances cannot lie, they can be feigned, invented, distorted, half-stated, misapplied, mistaken, or lied about with most infernal skill. It is upon circumstantial evidence so misunderstood that the claims of all impostors have been maintained from the falsi Neronis ludibrio which moved the hosts of Parthia to the pretensions of the claimant in the Tichborne case. The least mistake makes all the difference in the world. Suppose, for instance, that in the perspective of ages events should be so foreshortened that the years which cover Shakespeare's life-time and that of Milton should blend, it might be argued from the extracts from Comus, which are hereinafter set out, from an assumption that Shakespeare was an obscure and illiterate man, and from Milton's commanding intellectual force and erudition, that the latter wrote the plays in that heyday of his youth when, according to his own statement, he delighted in the sinuosi pompa theatri; or it might be maintained

with nearly equal force that Shakespeare wrote Areopagitica or Paradise Lost in his later years, after he had forsaken the vanities of his youth, had become devout, and had thrown all the forces of his mighty intellect into the polemics incident to a great political and religious revolution. These considerations are also relevant to what it is intended to submit relative to the theory that Francis Bacon was Shakespeare.

We can apply here the tests which decide our ordinary actions, and which in courts are found sufficient to adjudicate the most momentous questions. In the daily conduct of our lives we act upon the results of a calculation of probabilities. We frequently make it for ourselves, but as to our habitual actions it was made for us, perhaps thousands of years ago, and its results constitute what we call experience. In any such case, it is found from observation that a certain series of events is followed by certain consequences, so that an aggregate of circumstances being given we assume that but one result can follow. So unvarying are such results that, for all practical purposes, they are cer

tainties. These experiences form the path in which we traverse life. They guide our business conduct. They map the course of storms upon the sea. They know where planets will shine, what eclipses will occur, what comets will return, for all time to come. It is thus that order is introduced into what is apparently inextricable confusion, and relationship is established between subjects separated by vast intervals of time and space. This is the great triumph of comparative philology which demonstrated the affinity of languages, traced diverse peoples to a common origin, and went far to mark the stages of their progress from the table lands of Asia through all the centuries from the morning of time. From this the unity of many nations was deduced, and a substantial identity of their religious conceptions, primal laws and domestic habits became established facts. All this is the result of what Whewell calls the "consilience of inductions."

One fact seldom proves much beyond itself, but two facts may prove a third, and when among a hundred or a thousand separate facts, each shows a relation, not dependent on another but independent of it, to all the rest, and also a relation to some

other fact not susceptible of actual observation, but which is the object to be demonstrated; when each fact points to one cause or result, and to no other; when an analysis of the elements of each fact shows the same unvarying convergence to one point; when any one fact may be removed from any function in the process and the result remain the same; when research and addition to the mass of circumstances, instead of displacing its probative direction only renders it more steady,-the certainty that the object which they indicate is the solution of the question becomes so great that the most stupendous figures are inadequate to express the infallibility of the result. Every one remembers the problem of the blacksmith who engaged to shoe a horse for one cent for the first nail, two cents for the next, four cents for the next, and so on, doubling the preceding number for each nail until all the nails should be computed for. The result is an illustration of the high power of proof to which the accumulated and progressive force of many circumstances can be raised. It is true that one positively established fact, out of many, which points conclusively to another result, may entirely invalidate